Thanks Brian, now get lost - Shameful, but RFU are on to a winner

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Brian Ashton has a date at Buckingham Palace early next month when the Queen will express her gratitude for his services to English rugby. The RFU expressed theirs yesterday by confirming his sacking as head coach.

That an under-performing England team have been crying out for leadership — and that Martin Johnson is the ideal man to provide it — ought to be beyond question, even if his detractors decry his lack of coaching experience.

Judgment of Paris: Ashton congratulates his team after they beat France in the Six Nations

There can be no doubt the rest of the rugby world will sleep less soundly now that the greatest British player of his generation is running the show at Twickenham. But nothing can ever justify his new employers' shameful handling of a man who has endured it with unfailing dignity.

Excruciating is hardly the word. What an honourable man had done to deserve such dishonourable treatment will no doubt be of interest to his legal advisers.

Heaven knows, he has good reason to think long and hard about accepting the soft landing offered by the RFU, a return to his old job running their national academy.

The issue here is not that the RFU chose to appoint a new commander-in-chief, nor that they relieved Ashton of his duties, but that they failed to tell him what was happening behind the scenes.

Instead, fully a week after Rob Andrew's first meeting with Johnson, Ashton was still labouring under the misapprehension that he would be choosing a new team manager whose duties would be largely administrative.

As his line manager, the job of apprising Ashton was Andrew's in his capacity as director of elite rugby. Of course, there were confidentialities to be observed and the RFU's chief executive Francis Baron was adamant last week that Ashton had been kept 'fully informed', a claim repudiated by sources close to the man whose job had become the subject of daily speculation.

As one put it: "Brian's understanding of what's meant by “fully informed” is very different from the RFU's version. It got so bad that at one stage he had to ring them up and say: “Can you please get someone to talk to me”."

The grim reality was that his reign ended when Johnson made it clear at that first meeting with Andrew that he would, in effect, be the head coach and there would be no place for Ashton in the new coaching regime.

Why, then, did the RFU allow Ashton to go through the charade of holding a selection meeting with his two coaching assistants last Friday?

The other, more intriguing, question is to what extent Andrew's approach to Johnson had been motivated by the knowledge that a recommendation for Ashton to continue as head coach would have prompted a hostile reaction from key figures on the management board.

Andrew, remember, made no move for Johnson during the seven-week World Cup review which ended with Ashton's re-appointment.

Ultimately, the Six Nations reinforced the suspicion that something was not quite right about Ashton's team.

Scotland at Murrayfield will go down as the match which condemned him to the same fate as his predecessor, Andy Robinson. It was a performance as dire as the abject capitulation to South Africa in the second week of the World Cup, raising questions over leadership and direction.

Under fire for not picking Danny Cipriani sooner, Ashton had finally selected his 20-year-old protege only to remove him after he had been caught in a nightclub two days before the Scotland match. It was a brave decision which put team discipline above personal ambition, but Ashton was lambasted by Sir Clive Woodward, among others, for a 'massive over-reaction'.

How ironic that having had the courage to drop Jonny Wilkinson — not that his performance in Edinburgh left him much alternative — Ashton will not be around to reap the benefits of Cipriani spearheading a vibrant new generation of English backs like David Strettle, Mathew Tait and Shane Geraghty.

So the former history schoolmaster has made history himself — the first England coach to beat France in Paris twice in the same season only to be sacked before the end of it.

ASHTON RECORD

Played 22, Won 12, Lost 10.

2007: Scotland (h) won 42-20, Italy (h) won 20-7, Ireland (a) lost 43-13, France (h) won 26-18, Wales (a) lost 27-18, South Africa (a) lost 58-10, South Africa (a) lost 55-22, Wales (h) won 62-5, France (h) lost 21-15, France (a) lost 22-9.

2007 WORLD CUP: USA won 28-10, South Africa lost 36-0, Samoa won 44-22, Tonga won 36-20, Australia won 12-10, France won 14-9, South Africa lost 15-6. 2008: Wales (h) lost 26-19, Italy (a) won 23-19, France (a) won 24-13, Scotland (a) lost 15-9, Ireland (h) won 33-10.

POINTS: scored 485, conceded 475.

TRIES: scored 41, conceded 41.

 

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